


where the wildflowers bloom

by bloomerie



Series: buttercup [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bisexual Jaskier | Dandelion, F/F, F/M, Female Jaskier, Folklore, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, not between jaskier and either yen or geralt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:54:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22213627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloomerie/pseuds/bloomerie
Summary: Jaskier might run with witchers and witches, but she is, in the end, human.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennfer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: buttercup [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599100
Comments: 62
Kudos: 1288





	where the wildflowers bloom

**Author's Note:**

> I have zero excuse for this. Largely show canon, but borrows aspects from the games and books (ie, Jaskier does indeed have a horse).
> 
> Also, I provided a realish timeline? And tweaked the character's backstory a bit from the book.

This is Obdarta Lalka of Oxenfurt.

Once, she was Julia Eliaszowska from Morzawa, then Julia of Kerack. Now, she has been Obdarta Lalka for half a year. “Every performer gets themselves a name, love,” said Kuna when she finally garnered the courage to ask how she gained the moniker. She performs acapella on the Oxenfurt streets in a dirtied homespun dress swallowing her sapling-slender frame for a coin or five a day, and has yet to earn a place inside an inn or on a stage. There’s no one more deserving of the nickname _raggedy dolly_ than she.

Today she turns fourteen. She spends it outside the city with Kuna, her sometimes-teacher bent on instructing her in all the ways to survive the life of a street musician. Heady on the breeze is the smell of Midsummer: thick honeysuckle, the lazy river, sweet wine from the half-full decanter beside her knee. Cross-legged, she sits on the overgrown grass with her dress pooled above her knees and Kuna’s lute on her lap. Her fingers are awkward as she plucks the strings, clumsy from the wine and their soreness. Heat and golden sunlight lash the back of her neck, reddening the pale skin. He pours her a fourth portion into the glass nicked from the Rose and Crown, and tells her to drink.

Still plucking absently, she says, “But I’m dizzy,” and raises her head. He crouches close to her, watching her down the length of his beak-like nose with his dark, dark eyes. He’s thrice her age, with pock scars on rounded cheeks mostly hidden behind a neatly trimmed beard and sharp mustache, both as dark as his eyes. 

“It’s not every day a girl'll be getting to become a woman,” he tells her, his voice thick with a Velen accent he doesn’t bother to disguise the way she does her Keracki peasant’s lilt. He motions to the stolen glass. “Drink. We should celebrate.”

When he drinks, so does she, attempting to match his pace. Heat and wine spin her head, and when he takes the lute from her arms to lay on the grass, she offers no protest. Her limbs are heavy, sluggish. His dark, dark eyes never leave her face. 

“I don’t feel so good,” she says, or tries to say, because the words are muddled.

As though from a great distance away, she hears him answer, “I know.”

Then his hand grips tight on her shoulder. It’s midday, and the sun bright, and the road not far, but no one comes for her even when she screams.

A witcher and a songstress meet in a dusty inn at the Edge of the World. Their acquaintance should have ended there, in the inn’s darkest corner when she said, “I can change their option of you,” with more confidence than a child with breadcrumbs in her hair ought to have, and he answered, “Leave it be, girl,” but he can’t reach the door before his conscience stays him. 

“Oh it’s really quite all right, sir,” she’s saying, voice markedly higher than when she spoke to him, “Places to go. Songs to perform.”

Experience has long since taught Geralt that he should walk away from even the worst of human affairs, but he’s always been a fool in that regard. Against his better judgment, he turns, and sighs at the sight that greets him—the songstress smiling with all the false cheer of any woman attempting to say no, the arm of a man loose with drink encircling her narrow hips. Her lute hangs from a cross-body strap over her back. Pale sunlight reflects off the yellow ribbon in her braid and the yellow stitches in her pinafore, so she draws the eye of every patron in the inn. In a few years, she’ll likely be beautiful, but men surviving in a village that teeters on the edge of the world don’t care so much that she still has the shapeless frame and thin face of a peasant girl. 

“You won’t be making it to the next village by dark, m’little lady,” says a second man, more sober than the first. “Best you stay the night, I reckon.”

The innkeep watches, but doesn’t intervene, nor does anyone else. Through that smile, the songstress starts, “That’s a generous—” but Geralt steps forward before she can finish, accepting his fate. It’s not yet nightfall, but already the inn holds too many men turned hungry from drink and isolation. The girl should never have come. 

“She’s with me,” he tells her captor, who releases her abruptly. Fear permeates off of him, the sharpness of it replacing the stink of arousal. Though Geralt offers no explanation, no one asks. The girl flits to his side, her sunlit braid swinging, as light-footed as any songbird, or any witcher. Without a glance in her direction, he adds, “Follow me,” and knows, to his annoyance, that she’ll follow.

“Thank you,” she says the moment the door swings shut behind her. Gratitude is paliable in her posture and tone, clashing with the way the unfiltered light leeches her eyes of colour. “No one—thank you.”

Maybe she meant to say _no one else was going to help_ or maybe _no one ever helps._ Frankly, Geralt doesn’t want to know. “Do you have a horse?” he asks, and is genuinely surprised when she says she does.

Her filly’s a chestnut, like Roach, but mild mannered and hardly larger than a pony. “I call her Żyto,” she says once they’re both astride and out in the courtyard. Neither pay the stablehand any heed as he pisses in the untamed hedges. “I’m Jaskier, songstress of the Northern Kingdoms. It’s only fair you know my name if I know yours, especially since we’re to be travelling companions.”

“No,” he says, and looks her over from pointed nose to her ankles exposed between her dress and simple leather shoes. “A hunt’s no place for a little girl.”

“I’m fifteen,” she says, clicking her heels on Żyto’s sides to follow him when he attempts to leave her. She grins more sincerely than she had in the inn. “Not so little.”

Legally, it’s true that in most countries she’s no longer a child, but that doesn’t mean fifteen isn’t _young._ “Don’t you have places to be? Songs to sing?”

“I need songs to write first,” she says. The inn disappears from view as they round a bend. “My offer still stands. Already you’ve proven yourself more gallant than the title the ‘Butcher of Blaviken’ would it imply, or even just the general rumours about witchers that turn you into some sort of awful boogeyman. How does a _new_ title sound? I’ll think of one by the day’s end, I’m sure. I can at least see you have the coin to purchase a new set of clothes, Geralt of Rivia. Have you seen the state of them?”

He doesn’t answer. She’s already stolen every word from the air. 

Three weeks later, after surviving a sylvan and an ancient anger, she dances barefoot on an inn’s bar in a large town far from Posada, strumming at her new lute with her hair as loose and wild around her as any elf. A man’s Redanian bonnet fills with coin on a stool, and his full pay is heavy in a leather pouch at the bottom of his travel bag. Though he tells himself in every village and town that he’ll leave her there, he has yet to do so. Already, the girl’s made good on her word and that—well, that’s a fair bit better than he can say for most.

A year passes before Jaskier tracks Geralt to a village on Nilfgaard’s border to ask him to accompany her to Cintra. “It’s my first court performance,” she says, slipping onto the stool beside him as he calls the barkeep for more ale. It’s midwinter, cold as a grave inside and a death wish outdoors, but she still rode to him all the way from Novigrad. There’s colour on her cheeks from the wind and snow melting in her hair, but otherwise, she’s unchanged from how she looked when first they met. “Please, Geralt,” she says when he doesn’t swear his guard instantaneously. “What if they hate me? What if they chase me from the castle with torches and lances and set fire to my new dress? You probably won’t ever even know I’m dead.”

Though he’ll never admit it, he doubts that even the fearsome Queen Calanthe would find fault enough in Jask’s music to banish her. “If a songstress died in Cintra’s court,” he says instead, signalling the barkeep—a woman twice Jask’s age with generous cleavage that she’s spent the evening flashing him—“I’d hear about it eventually.”

“But here I am,” she says, insistent, “asking for you help. You would regret my death _forever_ , knowing you could have prevented it _._ ”

It’s not often she’s afraid around him, which was a disorienting experience at the start of their acquaintance, so it takes a longer moment than normal to place the nearby fear as coming from her. Nerves he would understand, but not this knife edge terror. Then he thinks of how they first met, of the man’s arm curled around her waist, and frowns. 

“Fine,” he says, sighing, and seals his fate. 

As he expected, the court receives her well, but Geralt quickly becomes Queen Calanthe’s focus. His concentration remains divided between their conversation, which he would rather not be having, and watching the court watch Jaskier. She and Queen Calanthe’s daughter are the same age, or close enough, but while the Princess attempts to disappear into her chair, Jaskier becomes her usual beam of light drawing the room’s scrutiny. A few petals fall from the buttercups and daffodils she laced into her hair beside the ribbons, and her skirts sway around her calves. She doesn’t sing about the White Wolf tonight. He doubts any man (or woman) watching her would believe she’s followed a witcher into nests of drowners or out-riddled a sorcerer even if she had.

After a short lull in conversation, Queen Calanthe suddenly says, “A witcher and a songstress make for unlikely friends,” and draws his full attention.

“We’re not friends,” he says, which is true. For one, he doesn’t have friends, and for another, Jask’s too young.

Arching a brow, the Queen says, “Then what are you?”

Jaskier finishes her song cycle. Without looking her way, he and the Queen clap politely. He says, “Business partners,” and hopes to leave it at that. 

“So you’re here to protect your investment?” He shrugs. “How very pragmatic of you. Yet you reject my offer of reward in exchange of my daughter’s protection.”

“A witcher doesn’t get involved in politics,” he says. He hasn’t touched his dinner; she devoured hers.

“You should have thought of that before you followed the songstress to court,” she says, and the smile she gives him leaves of more the impression of a wolf than a lion. 

As he goes to answer, the doors bang open, and through them strolls a knight with a helmet fitted firmly over his head. The Princess’ head snaps up, and her breathing quickens. The Queen’s hand curls into a fist where it lay flat on the table. As Geralt looks the newcomer’s way, he registers as a secondary concern that Jaskier is no longer in the room. 

Midway through the fight for destiny’s honour, she slips through a side door behind a Skelliger jarl and his wife, her face pale and skirts ruffled. The man, still slack from satisfaction, half turns to take her elbow with lordly politeness, and doesn't hesitate when she flinches. _Fuck_ destiny, Geralt thinks, but loses his opportunity to react when the Princess of Cintra grips her lover with her life and breaks the air around them. 

Julia Eliaszowska from Morzawa is the daughter of Eliasz Eliaszow, a fisherman with a dying longboat and rotting nets who works his trade in a village on the Kerack coast. When he and the rest of the village fall to plague, she’s three weeks shy of thirteen, and like that, an orphan. Her mother is long dead, having succumbed to childbirth after a fourth failed pregnancy; her brother left home two years past to seek an education in Oxenfurt. With no other option, she dons her traveling coat over her one good homespun dress, gathers a small bundle of salted fish and stale black bread, and ventures from ramshackle cottage she’s always known as home. 

In Oxenfurt, she sleeps in alleyways and snacks on the bramble berries growing from the bushes on the riverbed. It’s loud, and crowded from people and buildings stacked too close together. It stinks of human waste and stagnant freshwater, of overripe fruit and meat threatening to spoil. The colours are too bright. Each moment that passes in search of the university is a new assault on her senses that leaves her dizzy and desperate to flee.

Finally, she locates the central building, which is as tall as all the rest with two brick towers rising from end like a princess’ castle from a fairy tale. For days, she asks every stranger she encounters if they’ve heard of Jesion Eliaszow from Kerack, but the willowy woman with the quill in her bun and scar on her neck who takes pity on her and asks administration only reports that he denied of influenza in the university hospital not a year past without ever becoming a student. Julia stands shock still on the manicured lawn, unable to speak. The woman pats her shoulder, says, “My condolences, Eliaszowska,” and leaves. 

That is summer’s end. 

Untethered to family or village, she stays in Oxenfurt. She listens to street musicians to fill her days, and eventually, when the berries die, tries her hand at the trade. With her Keracki folk songs and sweet voice, she earns enough to survive, but not more than that. Soon, she loses the identity Julia Eliaszowska when the stall owners of the city’s central market rename her Obdanta Lalka instead. She suffers for that title, for her bare feet and ragged dress, for her mussed hair and unaccompanied voice. She suffers for them all through autumn, then all through winter, and the earliest weeks of spring.

On the day the frost melts, a tall, bearded man with a kindly smile and a beautiful lute says, “You’re doing well for yourself, all things considered, but you could be doing better.”

“I know that,” she says, folding her arms. They’re in the market, the citizens bustling around them in all their finery, paying the entertainment no heeds. The early morning chill raises goose pimples on her exposed arms. “Don’t much have the resources to change things though, ‘less a miracle comes to intervene.”

“I was in your position once,” the man says, tone so gentle it makes her blink, “until a more experienced bard showed me how to improve. I’m willing to follow his example, if you let me.” Holding out his hand, he adds, “Kuna.”

They shake. His fingers are calloused from plucking strings while hers are soft. “Obdanta Lalka,” she says, and when he smiles again, she smiles back.

In a final act of cruelty, the djinn left a handprint, raised and red and angry, across Jaskier’s throat in the exact size and shape of Geralt’s. He notices this detail the moment she collapses at his feet on the riverbank, but doesn’t consider its potential meaning to external parties until Yennefer of Vengerberg twists from where she crouches in front of Jask, purple eyes narrowed, and says, “A _djinn_ did this?”

Her distrustful gaze trails from his face to his hands, so his stomach twists. “Yes,” he says, teeth grip, and after a tense moment, she turns to Jask and repeats the question. 

Unable to speak, Jask only nods. The handprint leaks blood, bright on her pale skin. Then she coughs, and spits more down the dress Geralt knows was a gift from a duchess in Toussaint. 

“Stay, witcher,” the sorceress says without turning again, and magicks them away. What remains in their absence is the metallic odour of blood tangled a kinder, unique scent of lilac and gooseberries already imprinted into his head.

Impatient, he wanders into the kitchen, and drinks the last of Yennefer’s apple juice. The Mayor of Rinde snores on a bench beside a cabinet of expensive porcelain dishware, still as naked as a newborn, and Geralt’s own exhaustion pulls taunt at his skin. Two floors above, he faintly hears Yennefer’s footfalls and Jask’s pained breathing. There’s a cut on his arm from where the shattered jar sliced him, but it isn’t bleeding. When it broke, she laughed with her usual carelessness, said, “I’ll save my last wish for you,” before asking for an endless supply of Toussaint’s duchy wine and a final night in woman called Annarietta’s silk sheets. 

He never asked Jaskier what she did in Toussaint, or why she returned without warning after six months when the Lady Duchess requested her as a court performer. This morning was the first they’ve seen each since then, and if Yennefer can’t save her—

Well. Even if Jaskier isn’t his friend, she’s only human who’s never been afraid of him (except for once, just after the disaster in Cintra, when he snagged her from behind to keep her from triggering a hunter’s wolf trap and her heartbeat spiked so fast he thought she might faint, but he suspects that’s _different_ ). For that, he finds the thought that some of his last words to her were unfairly malicious to be...disagreeable. It’s the lack of sleep that did it. It’s the fact that after three and a half years, she’s beginning to lose her childish edge. Objectively, he knows humans age, but how obvious the change is after just half a year struck him with a force he hadn’t anticipated.

When Yennefer returns, the mayor is still asleep, and Geralt is spinning the empty cup mindlessly between his palms. “The girl is in a healing sleep upstairs,” she says, and when she throws the clothes his way, he catches them instinctively. “Bathe, and we can talk.”

“You want me to bathe?” Jask nags him to bathe constantly, and while he isn’t adverse, this doesn’t seem like the time.

“Not only can I tell the age and breed of your horse,” Yennefer says, appraising him with unveiled disgust, “but also the colour. By the smell. Follow me.” When she turns heel, the moonlight sneaking through the window shimmers through her black hair like fallen stardust. She’s beautiful, but that’s only to be expected from a sorceress from Aretuza. 

Her beauty is what first catches his notice, but his reasons behind binding their fates the following morning run far deeper than superficial attraction. When Jaskier asks—demands—to know why he risked his life to save her, though, all he says is “She saved yours.”

There’s blood splattered down Jaskier’s dress and though the handprint’s faded, it isn’t gone completely. Geralt, for all his impulsive wish-making, isn’t under any illusions of what Yennefer of Vengerberg is, and wonders if she left it there on purpose. “The girl’s very fragile,” she said when he first entered the room, before she placed him under her spell. On the bed, Jask lay small and pale and arranged, too like a corpse. “It would be better for both of you if she married some useless nobleman to give her plenty of children and stayed put.” That handprint has a message in it, and it’s one he doesn’t like.

“Thank you, Geralt,” Jaskier says when they lose sight of Rinde behind the spruce forest. Roach tosses her head, nosing the area for danger more ordinary than mages or monsters. “Really.”

A cool autumn wind bends the trees towards them and billows her skirts and loose hair. He clicks his heels, increasing their pace, and doesn’t answer.

Thick cloud cover shrouds the stars and moon, blocking the night’s natural light, and the temporary camp’s small fire smoulders weakly in the shallow pit. The Cintran wood is alive with shuffling in the underbrush and the echoing wingbeats of beats or nocturnal birds; somewhere in the distance, a barn owl releases a piercing cry. Though it’s no louder than any other wood where Jaskier has laid her head, and the leaf strewn earth a good deal softer than some, rest evades her. From his breathing, she knows it evades her travel companion as well.

As the owl’s screech fades into the night, Geralt says, “I didn’t think you’d ask me to be your bodyguard just to disappear.” The words border on condemnatory, but his tone is careful. 

She slinks deep into her bedroll, cheeks hot. “They were very insistent,” she says in an uncharacteristic mumble. This isn’t the first time that some of high birth, either man or woman, has approached her, but it’s certainly the first time she was on her knees in a castle’s ballroom. “Seemed rude to start a scene just to refuse.” 

For a long, long moment, he says nothing. Then, after _so_ long she thinks he may allow that to be the end of the discussion, he tells her, “Next time, start a scene. People like that are less likely to push the issue with an audience.”

In her experience, that isn’t true. A refusal just increases the other party’s aggression. But how can she say this now, that she still wakes some nights with the taste of wine slicking her mouth and the feeling of blood on her thighs, or that she knows well how to hide fear with false enjoyment? “Goodnight, Geralt,” she says rather than explain this, then rolls over, and pretends to sleep.

The first time Jaskier and Yennefer speak alone is in a middle class public house in Vizima. “Geralt isn’t here,” Jaskier tells the other woman before they even exchange hellos, but when she says she’s in town for her own business, Jaskier buys her wine, as is polite, and a meal to share. 

When Yennefer raises a brow, Jaskier says, “Even _you_ must like a good picnic,” because she firmly believes sharing a meal outdoors is the height of social connection. 

“You didn’t buy wine for yourself,” the other woman says while the barkeep readies their order. It’s not a question, but an observation. 

“Oh, I don’t have the taste for it,” Jaskier says with her easiest smile, and leaves it at that. Geralt, at least, never asked why she doesn’t order wine or ale or something stronger. “Follow me, if you can find it within your dignity.”

When they move outdoors with their lunch of bread, cheese, berries, and wine, Yennefer says, “You wrote a song about me.” She sounds halfway between accusatory and pleased. The design on her black and white dress is too intricate for a city like Vizima. 

“Who says it’s about you?” Jaskier answers, knowing exactly which song she means. “Though I’m _flattered_ that the great Yennefer of Vengerberg is privy to my works.” She pops a raspberry into her mouth. As a child, it was village tradition during the berry harvest to eat jam with rye bread and freshly caught fish. She hasn’t bought herself to have the combination since.

Yennefer scoffs. “As though it’s not,” she says, high and mighty and all-knowing. Even like this, at her most haughty, everything from the shape of her mouth to her posture exudes such a sense of self-assurance that it’s hardly surprising Geralt fell so quickly in love with her. “It’s too vindictive to be about anyone else. But,” she says, “I will admit that you capture what it’s like to love a woman remarkably well.”

Frowning, Jaskier says, “Well, I’m not entirely inexperienced. I’ve bedded princess and noblewomen and woodcutter’s wives. I _think_ there was even an outlaw once, but I was young, and was too afraid to ask.” She was too afraid to do much, then—at the time, the safest option always seemed to be to accept the other person’s intentions before she lost the opportunity to choose for herself.

“That’s quite the list,” Yennefer says, and leans forward, elbow balanced on her crossed knees with her chin resting on her fist. Her smile is so satisfied that it’s condescending. “I suppose then that it is possible that you haven’t written about me. Tell me then, what woman broke your heart?”

“None,” Jaskier answers, and eats another raspberry. Yennefer sips her wine, and stares at her over the rim of the metal cup, her violet eyes flat in the light. Inhuman. “No man or woman has ever had the privilege of breaking my heart, though I can’t claim I haven’t broken one or two myself. So, Yennefer. Yen. All’s fair. Who broke yours? Man, woman? Or is it only men?” 

With a sound that's almost a laugh, she says, “I live too long to limit myself, songstress, but that’s all you can learn today. I can’t risk you writing a second song about me, after all.” Then she quirks one side of her mouth into a half-smile that says, _I know all poets are liars, girl._

Jaskier firmly ignores the expression’s implication. “Well, it can’t be entirely true that you have _no_ limits on who you choose to warm your bed,” she says instead, and folds her legs beneath her dress, twisting to face Yennefer fully on the worn bench. “Even dying, I saw how well you chose your crowd in Rinde. That’s our one thing we have in common, maybe. A preference for beauty.”

“Partially,” Yennefer says, and drops her hand. “I suspect our interpretation of beauty differs, particularly when women are concerned.” 

Tilting her head, Jaskier asks, “What do you mean? Not that I don’t doubt it. I’m only asking for clarification.”

“I can acknowledge when someone is attractive without being attracted to them,” the other woman answers, as though that weren’t perfectly normal. “Generally I prefer the company of women with life experience and an assertive disposition. Regardless of how pretty their blue eyes, I don’t find soft girls a good choice for a partner. Next time you see Geralt,” she continues, standing, as Jaskier struggles to collect her wits after _that_ , “let him know I need his assistance dispatching of a spirit on Forefathers’ Eve in Brugge.” 

“Wait,” she starts, but Yennefer, ignoring her as surely as Geralt is wont to do, grows a portal into empty air before her, and steps out of Vizima with the wine still in hand. Jaskier stares at the space long after she’s gone and fails to process this new reality where Yennefer of Vengerberg finds her pretty. 

“I don’t believe you’ll feature much in this next one at all,” Jask says not a minute after Geralt dispatched of the noonwraith terrorising the Aedirn village’s sunflower fields. The fight was faster than he expected, but the heat leaves his head aching and his mouth dry. “Our Lady Midday’s tale has all the making of a good ballad on its own. Love, betrayal, murder, remorse—such a picturesque setting. I even have a title: ‘Lament of a Lady.’”

“Wonderful,” he says in a low grumble, and rubs the back of his hand across his forehead before turning towards her. Though the noonwraith had affected him, the consequences of the intense increase in temperature show themselves much more clearly on her, with her skin flushed pink where it's not hidden beneath the kecks and shirt she borrowed from the young son of one of the farmers who works the fields. Sunflowers bob over their heads, reflecting the noontime sunlight to cast a yellow glow across her hair. There’s a smudge of dirt below her left eye and a nasty scrape on her elbow, but the grin she graces him is honeyed from satisfaction. 

Almost offhand, last he saw Yen, she commented that she suspects Jask prefers proximity to danger than to any courtly affair. For not the first time, as he listens to her prattle about composition and the romance of ill-fated love, he thinks Yen was right. 

“Pay for this isn’t high,” he says as he sheaths his silver blade, interrupting her mid-musing. A sunflower head brushes the space behind his ear as the sense that he’s too hot slips away. “Make it a good one.”

Again, she grins, small and quick. “As you wish,” she says, bowing with a flourishing wave of her hand. He walks past her as she straightens, so she pivots, heels tapping, and falls into step beside him. “Though, I may need to give the Lady’s tale a happier end, at least for a public house of grieving men. How does a charming little rhyme about the mayor’s daughter hiding in the sunflower fields to escape her lover’s shrewish wife sound? Close enough to the truth, anyway, but she won’t die here, obviously. Hm. Perhaps the shrewish wife can be a witch rather than a murderess for now, and the Lady Midday will turn into a sunflower at the end. Or a field mouse. I wonder—” She hums a wordless refrain, then another, and shakes her head. Some of the flush has faded from her complexion. “No. Definitely not a field mouse.”

He doubts the full truth will ever appear in song, as Jask’s never performed anything as dark as a jealous wife burning and drowning a young girl. The skeleton they unburied in the field had revealed that the mayor’s daughter was barely older than Jaskier had been when they first met. When the mayor discovers what happened to his daughter, the cobbler and his wife won’t like the result. 

Jaskier spins in place, arms dangling and head bowed like a puppet on its strings, already plotting her footwork. Now that noble courts request her more often, she isn’t as consistent a companion as she once was, and at some indeterminable point in the last year, she lost the last of her girlishness. He doesn’t want to notice it, the way her slender body curves under the borrowed shirt or that strands of hair tugged loose from their ribbons keep catching on her chapped mouth, but he—does. _Soft,_ Yen called her, and soft Jask is, but the more he looks while trying _not_ to look, the more he finds he can’t see the fault in that.

More and more, it’s no longer Geralt and Yennefer or Geralt and Jaskier, but the three together. He can’t name exactly when this began, other than the oddity of it first occurred to him when he needed to travel to Yen’s shop in her hometown of Vengerberg to find a cure for magicked pocks, and Jask insisted on joining him. 

Now, after two months’ separation from them both, Geralt reunites with the women in a proper theatre in Oxenfurt, a city Jask tends to avoid, though it's where her accent originates. He’s here to complete a contract about a house spirit turned malicious; Yen appeared for no reason other than she wished, she said; Jask was in town already on some rich man’s invitation. It’s not common that he attends one of her performances outside of those in the inns they come upon in their travels, but she hadn’t acted herself from the moment they saw each other. Too fidgety, even for her, with her eyes flitting past him, searching. She was scared. 

So here he and Yennefer sit, tucked in the theatre’s back corner discussing the alchemic properties of goldenrod while Jask finishes her performance with a dialectal song that he thinks is about a butterfly and moth falling in love _(yurt be a winged maiden, wanted and wanting, who be seeking shae plain love fer all her lonely days)._ “It’s simple enough to acquire,” Yen is saying as Jaskier strums her final note in a disembodied echo, “but its resistance to magic just makes it so tedious to use.”

“It’s a flower,” Geralt says, exasperated with Yennefer’s casual laziness that reveals itself whenever she can’t find a magical solution. “It’s easy to pulp.”

“But at what cost?” she says, and shakes her head so her hair falls from face and over her shoulder. That day with the djinn, when he bound their fates, he hadn’t expected this to be the result—a friendship as casual at times as her laziness slotted alongside his less casual love for her. “The _time_ it requires, Geralt.”

On stage, Jask dips into a low courtesy, and catches a tulip as she straightens. More thrown flowers lie littered at her feet. “Thank you,” she tells her audience, beaming. Torchlight settles on her red dress and daffodil garland so she glows. “I’ll be returning with a new song cycle on the next full moon. I hope to see you all then.”

“Not any longer than grinding drowner brains,” he says, resolutely not raising his voice over the second round of resounding applause. Yen hums in what might be agreement, and sips her Temerian wine. There’s a calm to the evening he hadn’t expected, but appreciates nonetheless.

Slowly, the audience disperses, chattering on about Jask’s performance. There are times when, in rare bouts of sentiment, Geralt wonders if she has a magic of her own, the sort like a rusalka’s seductive call that explains how she can twist opinion or mood. As he and Yen drift into companionable silence, each watching Jaskier in that not-watching way, she half disappears behind a roving wall of adoring admirers. A child with a soot smudged faced and a newsboy’s cap slips through the thicket of adult legs with a bouquet of roses, yellow as her namesake, clutched in his fist. Over the steady conversation, Geralt hears her say, “Oh, they’re lovely, thank you,” and the boy answer, “’E said to tell you they’re compliments of your oldest fan, m’lady.”

Then Yennefer’s on her feet, her wine knocked on its side so it spills into the table’s grooves, and with a tremble in her voice, she calls, “Jaskier, don’t—”

Jask collapses with the soft thud of fabric on wood. The ladies around her scream in a shrill chorus. No one moves quick enough when Geralt and Yennefer shoulder through, nor back away until he turns and says, “Give her space. Get out. You—” He means to question the boy, but he’s already gone.

“Blood magic,” Yen says as a man behind them asks if Jaskier is dead. They ignore him as she clutches the bouquet, analysing the roses’ bloodied stems. More blood trickles from Jaskier’s index finger. She isn’t breathing. “Take her,” Yen says, glancing fleetingly at him over her shoulder, and creates a portal that causes a new chorus of gasps. “Be careful _not_ to drop her, will you?”

Even in stays and several layers of fabric, Jask is feather-light when Geralt rolls her into his arms. Already, her lips are forming a bluish tinge. Yen walks through the portal first, he just a step behind, teeth grip against the gut wrenching feeling of it, until he emerges moments later in her Vengerberg shop. He lays Jaskier on a cleared table, and retrieves the yarrow root pulstice Yen requests while she removes a silver knife from one drawer and a linen tourniquet from another. They don’t speak as she tears the other woman’s dress sleeve, ties the cloth tight below her shoulder, and gouges free the thorn travelling under her skin to her heart. That she drops on a metal and, with a wave of her hand, burns it to ash. 

With that, Jaskier wakes, gasping for air, but her are unfocused. Geralt starts, “Jask,” as Yen’s fingers brush the wound to apply the healing salve, and she _screams._

In their surprise, neither react fast enough to keep her from scrambling so desperately away from them both that tumbles from the table. He catches her before she hits the ground, but nearly drops her as an unfamiliar terror _of him_ floods from her, nauseatingly strong. She struggles against his hold, harder than he expects, even as he says, “Calm down, Jaskier, it’s just me.” Blood streams in a river from her arm, dangerous in its own right.

When she falls still again, eyes fluttering shut, it’s Yen’s doing. Geralt looks up at her, back over his shoulder, to see that her face has gone pale. They don’t speak, but an understanding about what this means passes between them regardless.

Later, Jaskier won’t be able to say what marks _this_ moment as the one that brings them together, if only because it’s so remarkably ordinary. Mundane, nearly. Geralt has no hunt, nor Yennefer some diabolical scheme to resolve, nor does Jaskier have a performance scheduled. It’s simply them, enjoying each other’s company on the outskirts of Kaer Trolde under the night-time sun. 

“You’ve grown up,” Yen says, interrupting Jaskier mid-sentence as she rambles about the merits of linen over silk in summertime. Gulls squawk above them, circling higher cliffs, and the wind whistles as it coils around the jagged rocks. 

She freezes, fingers buried in her hair as she stops plaiting as surely as she stopped speaking. “That does tend to happen at twenty-two,” she says, recovering a beat too slowly. Yen stares at her with a directness she once found intimidating, her unnerving eyes searching Jaskier’s face, while Geralt watches them sideways. They stand close on a cliff side overlooking the rough grey sea, breathing in salt and heat and wildflowers in bloom. 

Abruptly, she thinks there’s something terribly intimate about this—with neither she nor Yen dressed in any hint of finery, with Geralt stripped of his armour. Of them looking and Jaskier, consequently, being allowed to look in return. 

When Yen leans down, forward, to press her lips to hers, her fingers curled in her unfinished braid, Jaskier doesn’t move but to tilt her head to meet her fully. She’s too afraid to ask why this happening, _why now_ , why the great and powerful Yennefer of Vengerberg is kissing her on a cliff side in Skellige with the man she professes to love _right there._ Jaskier’s heart hares in her chest, chipping at her ribs. She wants this, and she wants more than this, and the thought of that is terrifying. 

Yen pulls away, but leaves her hand as a warm weight at the back of Jaskier’s head. When the other woman turns to look at Geralt, she follows her gaze, the movement reflexive. Following him has been instinct from the moment they met; she doesn’t know when it became instinct to follow Yennefer as well. 

For once, Jaskier is wordless when he steps closer, entering her personal space. His hands fall on her shoulders as Yen’s falls from her hair, his yellow eyes boring into hers, and he asks, “Do you want this, Jaskier?” 

The question is deliberate. Careful. “Yeah,” she manages to say, though her mouth is desert dry, and then, steadier, says, “Yes. I do.”

Then Geralt kisses her, and she forgets to breathe. 

Jask nearly wakes when Geralt moves to slip from the bed, but drifts again without a struggle after Yen brushes her lips to the back of her exposed shoulder and murmurs, “Sleep.”

Alone, Geralt steps outside the tent and into the mountain summit’s pale dawn. Sunlight breaks over the arctic alpine zone, outlining the treeless peaks in clear definition out to the horizon. Yen joins him seconds later, wrapped in a coat so thick that he can’t imagine it’s comfortable. He stretches, and his spine pops. She graces him with a half smile, one corner of her mouth quirked. Yesterday afternoon they witnessed three undeserving people fall to their deaths from the cliff, and by nightfall, they were tangled in each other on her sheets. 

“We should leave,” she says, smile dropping so her lips set into a thin line, “if we’re going to reach the dragon first.”

He balks, surprised even if he feels he shouldn’t be. “Still?” he says, a tightness creeping into his voice. “I thought we resolved this.” Perhaps he’s a fool to think it, but that’s how it seemed—the argument erupting for the second time that day with Jaskier caught wide-eyed between them, the heat of it brought cold when she asked if she, with the working parts she didn’t want, could help Yennefer instead.

 _I want to be important to someone_ , she said, as though she weren’t already. What she must have meant—what he hadn’t realised at the time, late in the night with Jask asleep beside him—was that she wanted to define what form that importance took herself.

Now, Yen folds her arms, and that determined line twists into a scowl. “How hypocritical,” she says, shoulders tensing as his do as well. “So you’re allowed to want what others say is impossible, but not me?” Before he can ask what _that_ means, she goes on, “It’s sad, how utterly desperate you are to be human. It won’t happen for a witcher—or a sorceress. I at least have a chance in this.”

“I’m not trying to be human,” he says, and if he were one, his face might flush in anger at the accusation. A witcher won’t be human. A witcher will never be a stablehand, and will die from a tumble off a cliff, or in a fool’s fight against a dragon rather than from old age.

Yen’s voice raises a note. “‘We could go to the coast,’” she says, repeating the words Jaskier spoke yesterday evening, after they reached safety and the knowledge that Bosch and his bodyguards had died because Geralt allowed it finally settled, “‘just the three of us.’” The scowl deepens, and in her own voice, Yen says, “She’ll never be your wife, Geralt.”

There’s too much that he can say to that for any retort to come to him immediately. Yen glares at him, eyes narrowed, as the wind whips at her coat and hair, daring him to contradict her. Witchers can’t be human, and witchers can’t have wives; sorceresses can’t be wives, and sorceresses can’t have children. Those are the truths of the worlds they inhabit, but here she is, standing on a mountain ready to fight a dragon for a fairy tale’s hope that she might cheat the latter. Likewise, here he is, inhuman and accepting of it, but unable to deny that he hasn’t afforded himself the slanted thought, when watching Jaskier teach village children some fleet-footed jig or kindle a fire, that in another life, she could have been more. 

Still, he has no choice except denial. Besides, it’s never been a tangible daydream, always part-formed and easily snuffed. 

“Where are the dwarves?” Yen says as he goes to protest, gaze flitting this way and that. “Fuck. They went without us.” She pushes past him, hurrying to the path, so he has to rush to follow before she goes too far ahead. The sun beats down on the dry mountain peaks, on the pale dirt and on them, lighting their way to the dragon’s lair without obstacle.

They leave Jaskier behind. 

Julia is four and one quarter when she hears the tale of the Witcher Who Knew No Fear. 

It’s her babcia who does the telling, spilling the fable as she weaves a new protective ceiling charm from dried flowers and hay and beside her, Jesion toots a simple tune on Mama’s old wooden pipes. They sit beside the winter hearth, its large yawning mouth exuding heat and soft light to warm the single room while outside a blizzard rages across their village. “So the Witcher did as he was bid,” Babcia says while Tata readjusts Julia on his feet to lead into her life’s first dance, “and set hisself for a long night on the temple’s ancient floor. Now, this Witcher thought it t’would be an easy night, believing that the crofters were giving themselves in to flights of fancy, because he, in afearing nothing, took to telling himself that us human folk were made to be afearing even our own shadows—”

Jesion trills, and Tata carries Julia into a jaunty dance, moving in time to his son’s music. As her babcia says, “Down and out from the chimney next came the torso, then the arms, and finally a head,” she giggles, too enraptured by her and her father’s joint footfalls to truly listen to an old woman’s tale. Babcia continues as Jesion continues his song and they their dance, the small family encased, just for the night, in the safety of a good story, and each other’s company.

In the mouth of a dragon’s cave, with a living dead man as witness, Jaskier’s world breaks open at her feet. 

“If life could give me one blessing,” Geralt says, voice raised and yellow eyes flashing in a way she’s heard and seen so many times before, but never directed towards her, “it would be to take you off my hands.”

For a moment, she can’t breathe. A buzzing fills her head, drowning her thoughts. She expects Yennefer to appear to defend her from this inexplicable anger the way she’s so often defended Yen from Geralt and Geralt from Yen, but a glance from left to right proves the other woman is gone. Cutting through the hurt and confusion is the clear understanding that a fight between the two of them finally went too far, and Jaskier is his new target in the aftermath of her abandonment. She clutches hard at her lute’s strap, and breathes shallowly. Only vaguely does she register the dead Reavers scattered around them, hyper-focused on Geralt’s yellow black eyes and the tension brimming through his body. 

Even standing above him as she is, she feels her own diminished stature and frame keenly. “That isn’t fair,” she says, meeting his gaze. “Geralt, I’m not—whatever just happened with Yen isn’t— _Fuck._ You can't treat me like—like I’m _ordinary_ to you. You’ve been taking me to bed long enough that you don’t have the right to cast me aside with just a word on—”

“What do you think this is, Jaskier?” he says, cutting her off. “You’re not my wife.”

Her blood runs cold in contrast to the heat of the midday sun, and despite her scramble to take hold of a singular coherent thought, words fail her. He, too, goes quiet. It’s different than his usual silence, but he doesn’t retract his words. He only stares at her, burning, willing her to disappear. 

Of course she’s not his wife. She’d be a fool to think that was so. Witchers don’t have families, and she was ruined for marriage the day she turned fourteen when the first man she was naive enough to trust pressed her flat on her back on the riverside and raped her. 

This disownment is far from a countryside violation, but it proves she hasn’t lost her childhood naivety as much as she thought.

Numb, toneless, she says, “That’s fair,” and, “goodbye,” before venturing down the mountain, alone and refusing to look back.

When Jaskier was seventeen, she spent half a year as the Duchess Anna Henrietta of Beauclair’s not-so-secret mistress until she left without warning one morning in late summer with just a farewell kiss and a promise to return. A decade passes before she does, but Annarietta is in high spirits from reuniting with her lost sister (courtesy, annoyingly enough, of Geralt), and accepts Jaskier back into court and into her bed with good cheer and open arms.

“You have grown more beautiful,” she says during their first night reunited, as though she, with her nude body dappled in the silver moonlight coming through her bedchamber’s tall windows and her curls cascading loose around her, doesn’t outshine any woman in the world but Yennefer of Vengerberg. “You must allow me again to have you painted. An update.”

“As you wish, My Lady,” Jaskier answers, and tugs Annarietta down to kiss her soundly, drowning herself in the rose oil the duchess combs through her curls and the feeling of her nails grazing over her skin. 

Jaskier can never be a wife, not to witchers or sorceresses or human men, but she can manage this: long sunlit days spent enchanting a duchy court with love songs and newly composed canzoni to boister national pride, and clear moonlit nights occupying the role of a noblewoman’s mistress. Though she holds no illusions of personal goodness, she carefully constructed her likeability over the years, so even Syanna, Annarietta’s ill-tempered sister, can find no reason to disfavour her. On a whim, Jaskier drafts for Midsummer a silly ditty about a songstress sprung fully grown and singing from a field of blooming buttercups that she hears within a month has travelled as far as the most remote villages in White Orchard— _once there was summertide sunlight on the yellow flower fields, which did yield Her Fair Lady, that sweet song poetess of mild mellow mind._

There’s a peace to all of that, but she remains, despite her greatest efforts, partially on the outside of it. No one seems to notice, to her relief, and so her act of contentment lasts for as long as it did a decade prior, from the start of spring to the end of summer. It may even have lasted far longer, if only Yennefer hadn’t appeared.

She walks through a portal in a rare moment Jaskier has entirely to herself, dusted in snow and draped entirely in black. “Hello, Jask,” she says as the glowing portal fades, and smiles as though it hasn’t been a year since she abandoned Jaskier as surely as she abandoned Geralt at the mouth of the dragon’s cave.

At a loss for what to do, Jaskier returns the greeting, and asks, “Is this an accident? Or are you staying to talk?” When Yen confirms the latter without discounting the former, Jaskier decides not to push the issue, and leads her from the exposed duchy vineyard to a lakeside cove that hides them from any prying eyes. “So,” she says as she turns to face Yennefer, her hands gripping tight at her lute's strap, collapsing into herself, “am I allowed to know what happened or am I just to be left in the dark?”

Knowing Yen, it likely is an unwanted coincidence that she happened to appear directly before Jaskier after a year of silence, but to her credit, she does explain what lead to the mountaintop fight—about dragon eggs and djinn wishes and destiny and a loss of free will. She doesn’t ask why Jaskier is here in Toussaint, because for as much as she demands the freedom of choice for herself, she has no qualms with prying into others’ thoughts to glean information rather than ask.

“That djinn didn’t bind you to me,” Jaskier says, but to her feet. She can’t bring herself to meet Yennefer’s eye.

The other woman doesn’t answer.

For a while, they stand together in silence on the thin strip of sand between the limestone outcrop and still water. Soon, Annarietta and her courtiers will expect her in the hall, and presumably Yen has her own business to sort. The silence is suffocating, but Jaskier is loathe to break it, because if she does, she might never see Yennefer again. 

In the end, Yen breaks it first. “A year is nothing to me,” she says. Jaskier raises her eyes to look at her again, to catalogue each contour of her face all subtly shifting as the fishbone clouds drift over and clear of the sun. “I haven’t been human recently enough to remember how long that is for you.”

“What are you trying to say?” Jaskier asks, frowning. “That you’ve just been in a sulk and assumed I’d be awaiting for you whenever you decided you were ready to grace me with your presence again?”

“Yes.”

It’s more blunt than she’s anticipating. She blinks. “Oh,” she says. “Right then. Well, as you can see, I _am_ human, so it’s been quite a long time, so I’ve moved on, and now Annarietta asked for me to be in court by—”

“I need to visit Skellige,” Yennefer says before Jaskier’s ramble gains speed. “Join me.”

Again, she leaves Jaskier at a loss. “And then?” she says finally. “You’ll leave again. You always do.”

“I always return.”

“Yes, after months.”

Despite their protests and the logic behind them, she knows as surely as Yen that they’re in vain. Already she itches from Toussaint’s peace and her six months of sleeping each night in the same bed, performing only for nobles. She isn’t made to be stationary. Beauclair, for all its beauty, is an airless room steadily drawing the life from her.

Yen’s kiss has a bite to it that Annarietta would never give. Until Jaskier met Yennefer, she mistakenly thought women were safer than men. 

“Your mare?” she asks when they part, though she stays crowded so close their foreheads touch and noses knock.

“Dead,” Jaskier answers, and lets Yen kiss her again.

The portal blooms into existence behind her. Without even offering the opportunity to tell a soul here goodbye, she walks Jaskier through in with a backwards step, and into a blizzard that swallows them whole.

Two months after Geralt and Ciri find each other in the wood, and two years after he ruins the one truly good thing in his life, they enter a poor man’s inn called Crab and Garfish in a small city in Cidras because she hears the singing. “I recognise that song,” she says, gravitating towards it even as he freezes, prepared to insist they turn and flee. “It’s ‘Buttercup.’” 

Though Geralt doesn’t know the song, he has the main voice spilling through the narrow open windows grafted into his memory. “Fiona,” he starts, but it’s too late, because she’s already drifted to the door, leaving him no choice but to follow.

Jaskier doesn’t notice them enter. She’s cut from a fever dream, performing her final number as she always has in establishments like this, dancing barefoot between patrons’ beer steins on the room’s long centre table. Her silk skirts—nicer than anything else in this inn—twirl as she does and her hair, longer than last they saw each other, moves with every step. The patrons sing in time with her, the words and tune more or less accurate, but garbled by the harsh dockworkers’ accent and too much ale. He _does_ know the song, he realises with a lurch. For the past year or so, he’s heard children sing it everywhere. 

She ends with a crescendo and a quick tip-tap of her feet that has her audience erupting into ruckus applause, which Ciri joins in and he does not. “Thank you, thank you,” she says, slinging her lute over her back, before dipping into such a deep curtsey that her knees nearly touch the table. More than one patron throws a flower at her feet, but she makes no move to reach for them.

As she rightens, a man calls, “’Nother for us, lass!” and her eyes land on Geralt.

For just a second, her smile falters, but she has it in place too soon for anyone else to notice. “Of course,” she says, and swivels in place before breaking into a damned _sea shanty_ without the accompaniment of her lute _._ _Dreckly as tis gettin' dimpsey thay a-sailin' the open sea, through 'ordes of 'unkypunks and over whippin' waves, 'ark now for I tell'ee—_

“What’s she saying?” Ciri says over the drunken sing-a-long. “That doesn’t sound like Common Speech.”

“It is,” Geralt says, but doesn’t elaborate to explain it’s the Keracki dialect long extinct among the upper and middle classes. “We should go.”

“But we just got here,” she says, and looks up him pleadingly. 

When he fails to insist immediately, she grins and shoots to the only unoccupied table in the back of the room. An older seaman with arms thickened from rope burn and tanned from the sun snags Jask by the waist when she leaps from the table, spinning her once before setting her on the ground. The audience claps in beat to her footwork on the creaking wood, and no one’s lyrics entirely match with the others’. Whatever this song is, it’s familiar and old.

He turns his back on the scene and joins Ciri, who watches the performance with rapt attention.

As he sits, Ciri says, “You know her,” as a statement, not a question, but the expectation of answers. 

“That’s Jaskier,” he says, and doesn’t appreciate the way the girl’s pale brows shoot towards her hair. Though he never meant to tell Ciri about Jask, it was inevitable; she was his inconsistent travel companion for eleven years, and he couldn’t explain who Yen is without her.

“This is fate, Geralt,” Ciri says, expression brightening. He cringes. “You can apologise!”

The sea shanty ends far too soon. “You’re too kind,” he hears Jask say, voice carrying high and clear above dust and din. “No, no—that's lush, but the pleasure was all mine, please.”

Low and conspiratal, Ciri says in a whisper, “She isn’t accepting their coin, Geralt.” After a pause, she continues, “Why didn’t you tell me she’s so _pretty?_ Oh, she’s coming over.”

He knew that already, cottoned on by the sound of her light tread growing closer on the unstable floor. As he looks her way, she comes to a stop at the head of the table, a pint in hand. “They insisted I accept free ale,” she says, sliding it in front of him, “so enjoy. It’s the local scrumpy so it taste like death. Hello. I see you found each other.”

Clearly startled, Ciri says, “You know me?”

“I knew your mother,” Jask answers, and smiles. “You look a lot like her.” Without waiting for an invitation, she sits across from Ciri, Geralt between them, and extends her hand. “I’m Jaskier.”

“Fiona,” Ciri says, accepting the shake, then glances at Geralt. “He’s being dumb, so I’m going to pet that cat and let you two talk.”

“His name’s Fat Boris,” Jask tells her in the same moment he frowns and says, “You can’t go wandering off on your own.”

Unfortunately, Fat Boris the mouser is well in view, which means, by their own agreement, that she’s within her rights to leave him here to deal with the aftermath of his mistakes. They watch her settle in a stool beside the poor creature before Geralt turns his attention Jask, who seems thinner and sadder than the morning he sent her away. Quicker than him, as always, she says, “When I heard about the invasion I figured you were going after her. I’m glad you found her.”

“So am I.” He goes to sip the ale, smells it, and thinks better of it. “I’m sorry,” he says, because he might not be good at apologies, but this one he’s had trapped in his throat for two years. “For what I said on the mountain.”

Though she should be angry with him, all she says is “Apology accepted” as if he hadn’t treated her like some meaningless fuck. Some tension bleeds from his shoulders, but her lack of anger is almost as bad as an overabundance. “What are you here for?”

“We’re taking the long way home,” he says. “You never told me you were from Kerack.”

“You never asked.” According to the song that brought him and Ciri in here, Jask sprung into existence from a buttercup patch. No, he didn’t ask, but for as much as she talks, she volunteers about as much information on her past as he does. She sighs, folding her arms on the table, and says, “I paid for a room at Natura Rerum for tonight, but I already planned on leaving right after this. Take it. It’s in Upper Kerack. Fiona deserves at least that much after however long you’ve been on the road.” 

Brow creasing, he asks, “Where are you going?” It’s not like her to pass on the opportunity to stay in a nice inn, or to play in one like this when there are better options nearby.

“There used to be a village sixty miles up the coast,” she says, and drums her nails once on the wood, “called Morzawa. I want to see if it still exists.”

“Do you want company?” The question spills from him before he can stop it.

She cocks her head. “Aren’t you supposed to be heading, you know, inland?”

With a shrug, he says, “I’m skint. Looking for a contract. One village is as good next.”

“Oh, fuck,” she says, more to herself to him, and buries her head in her arms so her hair falls away from her neck and back, revealing how severely her spine juts. “I can’t do this again. Nope. Not again. You’re going to come with me, then you’ll leave and I’ll never hear from you, not even a note, and—”

Just as impulsive as before, he says, “Come with us. Home.”

“What?” She slides upright. “Geralt, I’m being serious. Between you and Yen, I can’t handle just—I don’t know. I can’t handle assuming that you’ll come back, or that I’ll be allowed back, and finding out how ridiculously wrong I am. I’m just. I’m so _tired._ ”

And she looks it. For as much energy as she had in the performance, she can’t hide the bruised exhaustion under her eyes, or that she looks as half-starved as she did at fifteen. “I mean it,” he says, saving for later the question of what happened to her in their time apart. “Come with us. If that’s what you want.”

He sees the moment she wavers before she says it. “We're going to Morzawa first,” she says, so he agrees, and with that, a piece of the world returns to its rightful place.

**Author's Note:**

> Depending on the reception, I might change this into a series. Thoughts?
> 
> I'm dyslexic, so sorry about the mistakes.


End file.
